On Wednesday, October 21st, the Computer Science Graduate
Student Association (CSGSA) sponsored this year's first faculty vs graduate
student athletic event, a basketball match, which the graduate students' won.
Wednesday's basketball game was a great success, strengthening the relationship
between CS faculty
and graduate students. Afterwards both teams participated in a dinner sponsored
by the faculty team. The CSGSA had organized so far several social hours like
dinners, sport events, games nights and will be organizing more such events in
upcoming months. The events will be announced through the mailing lists and CSGSA website.
Related links: Computer Science Graduate Student Association;
The National Institute
of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has awarded
PiBBs a Phase II
interdisciplinary research training grant totaling $2 million over five years.
This training grant will provide sustained support for interdisciplinary
research training that integrates the biomedical sciences with the physical
sciences and engineering. The award represents the second phase of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)-NIBIB
Interfaces Initiative for Interdisciplinary Graduate Research Training, a
collaborative training program that was developed jointly by both institutions
with the goal of increasing interdisciplinary training opportunities.
From the department of Computer Science, Professor Stephanie Forrest, Associate Professor Terran Lane and Assistant Professor Melanie Moses and PhD candidates Sushmita Roy, George Bezerra, and Drew Levin have been contributing to this research initiative. This renewed funding will create more opportunity for interdisciplinary students and researchers in upcoming years.
Related links: Program in Interdisciplinary Biological and Biomedical Science (PiBBs); National Institutes of Health (NIH); The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB); Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI); Professor Stephanie Forrest; Assistant Professor Terran Lane; Assistant Professor Melanie Moses; Sushmita Roy
PhD candidate, Amitabh Trehan, received the Dean's Dissertation Fellowship for the year
2009-2010 for his dissertation proposal "Self-Healing networks". The fellowship
will provide one year financial assistance for the completion of his PhD degree.
Earlier Trehan was nominated for this fellowship by the Computer
Science department.
Trehan's recent research focuses on developing distributed algorithms for self-healing and stability in dynamic networks such as computer networks. His last two papers in this area have been accepted at the prestigious conference, Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), in both the year 2008 and 2009. His advisor Prof. Jared Saia's guidance has been helping him mature as a researcher. In future Trehan wants to become an academician and continue research, learning and teaching computer science
Congratulations Amitabh!
Related links: Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC); Dean's Dissertation Fellowship; Prof. Jared Saia; Amitabh Trehan;
In an article on Wired News' GadgetLab blog\
, Associate Professor David Ackley talked about
programming the 'Illuminato X
Machina', a motherboard prototype, that uses separate modules each of which
has its own processor, memory, storage and communications. The article was
quickly picked up by tech hub Slashdot
and sparked discussions among it's tech savvy users. Prof.
Ackley was also featured in popular gadget blog Gizmodo.
Each square cell of 'Illuminato X Machina' serves as a mini-motherboard and network node; the cells can route power among themselves and decide to accept or reject incoming transmissions and programs independently. By varying the count, connections, and programming of a set of modules, aggregate computers can be created with properties tuned to the task at hand.
Although the 'Illuminato X Machina' is not yet generally available, UNM students will be building them into 'computer collectives' in Prof. Ackley's Fall 2009 class on 'Robust Physical Computation'.
Related links: David Ackley; Illuminato X Machina; Wired News' GadgetLab blog article; Slashdot article; Gizmodo article.
PhD student Sushmita Roy received a Computing Innovation Fellowship for her
proposal to develop 'A machine learning framework for learning networks across
multiple species'. The fellowship was awarded by The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and
the Computing Research Association (CRA) with
funding from the National Science Foundation.
The fellowship grants her a year's funding for doing post-doctoral research at
the labs of Dr. Aviv
Regev and Dr. Manolis Kellis at The Broad Institute of MIT and
Harvard. Roy was among the 60 grantees who received this fellowship from
more than 500 applicants.
Roy's research focuses on machine learning approaches to solve problems in computational biology. For her PhD dissertation she is developing statistical approaches for learning condition-specific networks, which are gene networks describing how living cells behave in different environmental conditions. Her advisers, Dr. Terran Lane (Computer Science) and Dr. Margaret Werner-Washburne (Biology) are guiding her efforts in making algorithmic advances for understanding environmental condition-specific response in simple biological systems such as yeast. In the future she would like to extend her approach to understand various disease conditions, which has implications in human health.
Congratulations Sushmita!
Related links: Computing Innovation Fellowship; The Computing Community Consortium; Computing Research Association; National Science Foundation; Dr. Aviv Regev; Dr. Manolis Kellis
Professor Darko Stefanovic's research on molecular
computing was featured in an article at the June 2009 issue of Nature
Phyiscs (Vol 5, No. 6). The article, "Attack of the cyberspider", (subscription required) emphasizes his
joint research with Prof. Milan Stojanovic of the Department of Medicine at
Columbia University on molecular computing and control.
Prof. Stefanovic and his colleagues used single-stranded DNA to design a number of simple logic gates based on chemical activity. Their implementation works in solution and can be used to carry out information processing in biological fluids. The article predicts that future molecular control systems will be able to detect specific DNA sequences, for example, and to release specific drugs or molecules in response. Their recent development, molecular spiders - biomolecular systems having two to six extended deoxyribozymes attached to a protein - is also discussed in the article.
Prof. Stefanovic's work in biomolecular computation has earned him a number of NSF grants and he was also named the School of Engineering's Regents' Lecturer, based on his outstanding research, teaching and service accomplishments.
Related links: Darko Stefanovic; Nature Physics; Molecular Computing Group; Molecular spiders
Professor Jedidiah Crandall is the recipient of a
2009
National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award for his project titled,
"Internet Measurement in the Cat's Cradle of Global Internet Censorship".
According to the NSF, the CAREER award offers "the National Science Foundation's
most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of
teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the
integration of education and research." The award amount is $400,000 and will
support the research project for five years.
Prof. Crandall's research is laying a foundation for the study of Internet censorship by developing measurement techniques that are not biased by the inherently computational issues that Internet censorship entails. For example, Internet routing and protocol dynamics can cause measurements, of both what is censored and how it is censored, to give inaccurate results that are difficult to reproduce. This hinders the development of effective technologies and policies to address this global phenomenon. Already, Prof. Crandall's research has appeared in news outlets such as the BBC, EWeek, Slashdot, and Ars Technica, and was mentioned in the Atlantic Monthly.
Congratulations, Prof. Crandall!
Related links: Jedidiah Crandall; NSF CAREER award 2009; BBC; EWeek; Slashdot; Ars Technica; Atlantic Monthly
Distinguished Professor Deepak Kapur
will receive the prestigious Herbrand award at the 22nd International Conference on Automated
Deduction (CADE) in Montreal in August. The award is in recognition of
Professor Kapur's seminal contributions to several areas of automated deduction
including inductive theorem proving, geometry theorem proving, term rewriting,
unification theory, integration and combination of decision procedures, lemma
and loop invariant generation, as well as his work in computer algebra, which
helped to bridge the gap between the two areas.
Named after the French mathematician Jacques Herbrand, the award was established in 1992 by CADE to honor an individual or a group of individuals for exceptional contributions to the field of automated deduction. The Herbrand Award, the most prestigious award in this field, is decided by the CADE trustees, former recipients, and the current program committee of CADE.
Professor Kapur's research in the field of automated deduction includes mechanization of logical, algebraic and geometric reasoning and their applications to formal methods such as program analysis and hardware verification, as well as image understanding.
Professor Kapur served as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Automated Reasoning, the premier journal in the area of automated deduction, from 1993-2007.
Congratulations, Deepak!
Related links: CADE Inc.; Herbrand Award; Deepak Kapur; Journal of Automated Reasoning
Palacios 1.1 and Kitten 1.1.0 were recently released. These operating systems are part of the V3VEE project worked on jointly by Northwestern University, UNM, and Sandia National Laboratories. Palacios is a virtual machine monitor, while Kitten is a lightweight kernel for high performance computing. They allow better use of the Red Storm supercomputer, among other uses. The UNM team consists of Prof. Patrick Bridges, graduate student Zheng Cui, undergraduate Philip Soltero, and Research Professor Patrick Widener.
Related links: OSDev.org
announcement; Patrick
Bridges; Patrick Widender; Red Storm; Northwestern University; Sandia National Laboratories
PhD student Diane Oyen won a School of Engineering Regents
Graduate Fellowship, of which three are awarded each year. The award carries
with it a $2000 stipend.
Diane researches machine learning with her advisor Prof. Terran Lane. She has been analyzing neuroimaging data by modeling the brain as a network of activity, especially to find how mental illness affects this network.
Congratulations Diane!
The students in Joel Castellanos' CS 351 class (The Design
of Large Programs) worked on a traffic simulation of the Raynolds Addition /
Barelas Stop Sign Reconfiguration Proposal. This is a current reconfiguration
proposal in the area of Albuquerque near the zoo, the bio park, and Tingley
Park.
The class met with various people including Albuquerque City Councilor Benton as well as members of traffic safety department, from whom they obtained accuRate accident rates and traffic volumes at and between each intersection at various times of day. They created a simulation of the intersection using that data. The city is planning to include an applet version of our student’s simulation on their website for citizen view of the proposal.
The students involved are: Jonathan Baca, Omar Garcia, Basak Gocmen, Thomas Gonzales, Annette Hatch, Patrick Mahoney, Jonathan Mandeville, Santiago Montalvo Fernandez, and Trent Yocom.
Related Links: Traffic Simulation Plan (PDF)
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